Pho

Andrew Lam’s chapter on Pho, “Ph[o]netics,” not only left me starving for Vietnamese food, it also was a savory bit of craft. Let’s look at how it was cooked up. It starts out with a delicious description of the dish itself. “Spiced with roasted star anise, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, charred ginger, and onion, and made savory by fish sauce, the soup is brewed at a low heat until the beef falls off the bone and the marrow seeps.” (123) (Sorry vegetarians!). Now that he’s both explained pho and gotten our attention, he throws out a line comparing the soup’s journey with the Vietnamese diaspora and dives into the role pho plays in his family, the bragging about who has eaten pho where. “For within the culinary experience is the theme of our journey itself.”

The family discussion starts out a bit general, but then Lam chops in a bunch of italicized excerpts of pho stories, presumably each by a different friend or relative. My guess is these are really all his stories, but he mixes them up with conversational lines like, “Can you believe it?” or dialect, “Mind you, I hate them commies,” as well as regional English, like, “...Even the bloody yetis.” Regardless of whether he made them up, they’re good stories, well told, and it works, jumping for tidbit to tidbit. He concludes this part by switching off the italics and writing, “Have broth, will travel” (126).

From there Lam brings us back to his own personal narrative and puts it on a low simmer, telling in the detail the story of a pho chef, cooking in the basement of a Belgian castle. It feels comforting to return to his personal narrative. He has already made his point about the pho diaspora and now wants to drive the point home with a deeper, more careful narrative. It as if he has stashed the handheld movie camera and is now giving us the smooth, tracked shot to allow us to process what he’s telling us. The last sentence of the story, “...She felt as if she were on a movie set and kept waiting for the director to yell “Cut!” (127) not only reinforces this idea but ending with the word “Cut!” is a brilliant way to take us into the next part of the chapter.

After giving it some whitespace and a dash of dashes (Which is either overkill or works nicely with the word “Cut!”...I can’t decide.), Lam brings us back to the global narrator, discussing internet searches of “pho soup” and giving us a bit of its history. He concludes, “Like the country whose history is one of being conquered by foreign powers and whose people must constantly adapt to survive, the soup has roots in so many heritages yet retains a distinctive Vietnamese taste” (128).

Finally, just when he might have overcooked it with too general an ending, he serves up the goods, this time a childhood memory in Dalat. “I would wake up on the weekend with that exquisite aroma of pho permeating our villa...I can still hear it: Mother singing downstairs, her ladles clattering against the pots and pans, the steady chopping sounds of the cleaver on the worn wooden block.”

Slurp.